My USB Stick Shrunk!

It is still a mystery to me but it happened. My 16GB USB stick has shrunk in capacity to merely 1GB. I was trying to load Vanilla ChromeOS on it and the prompt says it was successful. But the OS on the USB does not want to boot the computer. It seems that the data inside has been corrupted. So I did format it again to delete all the installed elements within.

To my surprise, the capacity, according to the windows explorer is just 1GB (1) after the format. I've searched google for answer, but there was no straight forward procedure to follow. Most of the articles involve downloading a software to fix this problem. I turned to youtube and a very helpful post from PKV'sChannel has helped me restore my USB into it's full capacity. I watched the video and recorded as he goes everything on a note pad.

Here's how.

Command prompt diskpart

Go to command prompt console by clicking start>type 'diskpart' at the search box (without the qoute) to get you into the disk partition utility. Then type  'list disk' and the computer shows you all live drives, the hard disk(1)(Disk 0) and other drives. The disk of interest is Disk 1(3), which it says 14GB capacity, but windows explorer only sees it as 0.99GB(3a)

Carefully select the disk to reformat

This is the crucial part. You need to be sure the location of  your drive as this will erase the content of the drive selected.

 Continue typing on every prompt ,  'select disk 1', 'select partition 1' , 'delete partition'. After delete partition, you will notice that Drive D disappeared from windows explorer.

Reactivate the drive by creating partition.

Continue typing on every prompt, 'partition', 'create partition pimary'.

A vitual disk error occurred after 'create partition primary'(4). To rectify this, type 'clean' (5) then type 'create partition primary' again.

The console will tell you when it has been successful and a prompt to format the disk will pop up.

Reformat

After formatting the disk, the original capacity(8) is then  recognised by windows.

Here's the list of the commands after every prompt (DISKPART>):

diskpart

list disk

select disk(the number of the disk location)

select partition(the number of the disk location)

delete partition

partition

create partition primary

clean(optional if you will encounter error)

create partition prima